


When You Open It to Speak

by MoreHuman



Series: Married Without Children [3]
Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, M/M, Queer Families, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:15:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22702324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoreHuman/pseuds/MoreHuman
Summary: “I thought it was a great event.” Patrick gives Janice a thumbs-up, just to torture him. “And you’re the one who said Valentine’s Day is a holiday only celebrated by grade schoolers.”“I meant that as a brush off,notan invitation.”
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Series: Married Without Children [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1592206
Comments: 113
Kudos: 509





	When You Open It to Speak

**Author's Note:**

> It felt silly to up the rating for a single f-bomb, so just be warned that there’s one in here.
> 
> Many thanks to Distractivate and Likerealpeopledo for offering reassurance, sight unseen, that this doesn’t suck. I tried really hard not to turn you into liars.
> 
> The title is from My Funny Valentine because creativity is dead. Let’s say it’s the Rufus Wainwright version, to keep with the theme of Canadian artists for this series.

David can’t close the store fast enough. He flips the sign on the door before Janice and her luggage cart of watercolor supplies are even through it. She gives an enthusiastic wave through the glass just as it slams between them.

“We are never, ever doing that again,” David says through a frozen smile, stretching one arm across Patrick’s shoulders for fortitude. He refuses to turn around and confront the mess that today’s horde of over-damp children left behind. Not yet.

“I thought it was a great event.” Patrick gives Janice a thumbs-up, just to torture him. “And you’re the one who said Valentine’s Day is a holiday only celebrated by grade schoolers.”

“I meant that as a brush off, _not_ an invitation.”

Patrick gets a glint in his eye that David recognizes as his _I’m about to quote your exact words in a way we both know you never intended, but that you will be unable to dispute_ glint. It’s a lot of words to read into a single glint, sure, but that’s just the kind of accuracy you get when you’ve been flirting with the same person for ten years.

“What about when you said it’s a holiday only celebrated by guilty husbands overcompensating for their affairs? Was that an invitation?”

“No. Mm-mm. Nope,” David disagrees thrice, as if that will do any good.

“Because we could always host an event for them next year instead. I wonder if I could track down that hacked Ashley Madison email list by then. Those leads must still be good.”

“Wow.” David tries to recoil away, but Patrick catches him around the waist, tugs him in close.

“Would a couples’ pottery class called _Ghost Your Spouse_ be too much of a wink? We could hand out Demi Moore wigs, dim the lights, play Unchained Melody on a loop–”

“Okay, this idea is _officially_ horrifying, congratulations. Can we stop now?”

“What’s a Demi Moore wig?” asks Jayson, and David had forgotten he was still here. The blond boy is perched on a stool at one corner of the main table, signing his stack of hand-painted valentines. Unlike the heathen swarm that just left, he’s doing it quietly.

“Something only the most exquisite bone structure can pull off, and your Uncle Patrick knows it.”

He feels Patrick give his waist a gentle squeeze, and angles his neck to receive the kiss he knows is coming next. He’s been following along to the rhythm of Patrick’s affection for so long he can do it with his eyes closed. They break apart to their respective cleanup stations—Patrick to the broom and David to restore the center table to order.

“What do you think, Jayson?” Patrick asks, shooting a goading grin in David’s direction. “Should we invite you back again next year to make more valentines?”

“Oh, Jayson is welcome any time, he knows that.” David gestures across the rest of the table, which is a mess of scrap paper, spilled paint, and enough disembodied bristles to stuff a pillow. Like no one ever taught these children how to respect a paintbrush. “It’s his lesser peers that I refuse to ever see again.”

He already knows they’re going to host the same event next year. They sold far too many of the medatation candles and hand-dyed play silks not to. The Instagram moms (or what used to, in his day, be called Instagram moms; who knows what social media the young people are staging their fake lives on these days) who want to come paint with their kids are powerless to resist them. Still, he’s going to make the most of his protest while he can.

“One of them kept painting with his fingers. On purpose. None of us should have had to witness that.”

Jayson just sighs and says nothing. He’s—David does the math: three at the wedding plus seven years married equals—ten now, and in the last year or so he’s traded in some of his prior exuberance for this new reserve. His mom Rebecca is taking classes on childhood development, and says this kind of personality shift is normal for kids around this age. As they start to realize just how big the world is, they sometimes turn inward to try to find their place in it. David, whose childhood developed anything but normally, has to take this wisdom on faith.

They work side-by-side in silence for a bit, David wiping up puddles of soggy trash and Jayson signing card after card with _Love, Jayson; Love, Jayson; Love, Jayson_. David glances down once and each of those Ys feels like a needle to the eye.

“This is so stupid,” Jayson moans and David almost agrees until he remembers his nephew can’t possibly be talking about the spelling of his own name. “Why do they make you give one of these to everyone in the class? How is the person you actually have a crush on supposed to know?”

The broom clatters to the floor.

“Uh, sorry. Slipped.” Patrick retrieves the broom, tries to lean against it casually, and almost topples over. “Who do you– Who do you have a crush on, buddy?”

Oh god, this attempt at nonchalance is embarrassing to watch. David’s curious, too, but come on.

“Nobody,” Jayson says.

He goes crimson and looks down at the floor, not at any of the fanned-out valentines in front of him, which are addressed to _Almabeth_ and _Karsyn_ and _Orca_. Good lord, does no one know how to name a child anymore?

Patrick opens his mouth again, but David shoots him a look, widening his eyes in that way that means _Shhhhhhhhh!_ in Rose. Maybe this is the moment Jayson starts sharing his orientation with them, and maybe it isn’t. He knows Patrick is anxious to show his support, but anxiety is not what this particular juncture calls for.

“You know,” David says, “I think I’m going to need some caffeine to get through this disgusting task. Would you go get me a coffee, honey?”

Patrick looks like he understands the true intention behind this request, but can’t believe it. He glances back and forth between his husband and their nephew. “You’re… sure?”

“I’m always sure about coffee, yes.”

“Okay.” Patrick leans his broom against the vegetable crates and retrieves his coat. When he does it up, the plastic utility zipper squeals indecently into the silent room. “Be back soon.”

It’s not until the door rings shut behind him that David feels the full weight of his own decision. It used to be that he could hardly stand to be in the same room when _Patrick_ was the one answering Jayson’s difficult questions. Now he’s just volunteered for a solo mission. Strangest of all, he knows exactly what to say.

“When I was your age,” he says and yes, excellent start, “I had a huge crush on this girl from Hebrew school, Hannah–”

“You had a crush on a _girl_?” Jayson interrupts.

“Well. Yes.” David blinks. He always forgets that this is one of those things people tend not to know about him unless he tells them. And that children tend not to know anything unless you tell them. One of the many axes he has to grind with the entire concept of procreation is that it means he’ll never run out of family to come out to. “I had crushes on girls and boys and, um, everyone.”

Oh great, now this child thinks he used to be a slut. Which is at least better than him _knowing_ he used to be a slut. David briefly clamps a hand over his mouth in case it tries to say that next. Not that he’s ashamed, but it’s not relevant information.

“I mean, I didn’t _actually_ have crushes on everyone, that would have been exhausting. I just had crushes on people because they were _people_ I liked, not because they were _boys_ or _girls_ I liked. I like the–” but kids don’t drink wine, what do kids drink?? “juice and not the… box. Does that make sense?”

Jayson gets a serious crease between his eyebrows that looks so much like his godfather’s. “Not the juice part, but the rest of it, yeah. I think so.”

“Okay good, just forget about the juice part then. It’s a flawed metaphor anyway.”

“Uncle Patrick didn’t have crushes on girls, did he?”

“Uh, he– Um.” The moment when David knew exactly what to say feels so far away now. “You’ll have to ask him.”

The truth is David wouldn’t know how to answer this question even if he wanted to. He’s sure Patrick expressed crushes on girls growing up, especially using the rituals of something like Valentine’s Day. At one point his husband thrived on nothing more than meeting clear expectations. None of those crushes would have been real, but only Patrick can say whether or not they count. David knows he still counts Rachel as someone he loved, even though–

“So did you give her a valentine?” Jayson asks.

David can’t parse the pronoun in this question. “Um… Rachel?”

“Didn’t you say her name was Hannah?”

“Oh! Hannah.” Right, the interrupted cautionary tale. “No, we didn’t really do Valentine’s Day at Hebrew school, Christian saint and all that. But I sat next to her every week during recitations and worked _really_ hard on my pronunciation so she would notice me.”

“Did she?”

“Mmm, no. Some other boy gave her a Patti the Platypus beanie baby for her birthday and she sat next to him during recitations after that.”

“What’s a beanie baby?”

“Oh.” David feels like he might shrivel to dust and blow away on some ancient breeze. “I don’t think we have time for that.”

The door jingles again and Patrick comes in, smiling and red-cheeked, holding a tray of three hot drinks. A spray of snow slips in with him and he’s a bundle of warmth in the swirl of cold.

“What did I miss?” he asks.

“I was just telling Jayson that when you like somebody, it’s always better to do something than nothing.”

Now that it’s out of his mouth, it sounds like such weak, obvious advice. David can’t remember why he thought it would be wise.

“Hmm,” Patrick distributes the drinks, plants a chilled kiss on David’s cheek, and starts shedding his coat. “Can’t argue with that. I’m just grateful you finally learned to follow your own advice. Otherwise I might still be hanging around here, a decade later, just waiting for my opportunity to kiss you.”

Oh, maybe that’s why the advice felt wise. It only seems obvious now because he forgot there was a time before he knew it was true.

“Uncle Patrick,” Jayson says around a gulp of his hot chocolate, “who did you have a crush on when you were in fourth grade?”

“David Westin,” Patrick replies easily, and you would never know this answer used to be so layered over with hesitation that it was invisible. There’s no trace of it now. “He had beautiful dark eyelashes.”

“Um, hello.” David straightens up. “I never knew your first crush was also a David with beautiful dark eyelashes. That’s adorable.”

“Oh, he wasn’t my first crush,” Patrick says. “My first crush was the animated Robin Hood fox.”

“Okay, everyone’s first crush was the animated Robin Hood fox.” David waves a hand to circumscribe the full universality of this experience. “That’s a given.”

“So what did you do?” Jayson asks. “How did you let David with the eyelashes know you liked him?”

The teasing grin evaporates from Patrick’s face and he’s silent for a full minute. It’s the longest he’s ever let one of Jayson’s questions go without an answer.

“I didn’t do anything,” he says finally.

David rests a hand between his husband’s shoulder blades, right against the tension he knows is forming there. The only thing Patrick hates more than inaction is admitting to inaction, but right now he has no choice. No matter how clearly he sees, now, exactly what he wanted to do back then, he’ll never be able to reach across time and do it.

“Why not?” Jayson asks.

“I didn’t actually know I liked him until I was much older. When I was your age, I didn’t know I liked boys.”

“How come?”

David rubs some pressure up and down Patrick’s spine. He can’t help answer these questions, but he can do this.

“It’s hard to say for sure, but… I didn’t really know it was possible to be a boy who liked boys. That was so different from everyone I knew. I never had anyone like your Uncle David in my life back then. I’d never seen someone who was so comfortable being different.”

A flashbulb pop of recognition lights up the full picture right there in front of David’s face. He knew Patrick didn’t grow up knowing he was gay, and he knew Patrick didn’t grow up with a constant parade of queer pride—makeup artists and stylists and photographers and trained wig handlers—marching through his house. Until now he hadn’t pieced together that those two facts are related. All these years, he assumed Patrick kept saying that David was an important person in Jayson’s life to stroke his ego. He never realized Patrick was looking at him through the eyes of the child he used to be.

But David’s not the only queer uncle in the room. He’s not the only one comfortable being different. And fuck it, Patrick’s going to get to live out a tiny sliver of the queer childhood he deserves if David has to reach back across time himself.

“So what would you have done?” David asks, a nudge in his voice and his fingertips. “If you knew, how would you have told this other David you liked him? I’ll try to contain my jealousy.”

Jayson is radiating anticipation, leaned so far forward that the back foot of his stool has left the ground. This is a kid thirsting for a plan of action, and he’s about to find out that he’s talking to just the right person.

Patrick picks up one of the blank cards from the table, an extra from Jayson’s pile. There’s a row of ombré hearts on the cover, a slow fade from blue to red.

“Well, I definitely would have given him one of these watercolor valentines, which look like they were created at a very successful event organized by someone with impeccable taste–”

“You know I’ll never turn down flattery, but I’m not changing my mind,” David says, omitting that he already has.

“–and to make sure he really knew that I wanted him, specifically, to have one, I’d have put some song lyrics inside.”

“Song lyrics?” Jayson asks.

Patrick nods. “Song lyrics are great because they’re your words, but they’re not. They let you say what you’re feeling before you’re ready to actually say it.”

“Does that really work?”

David recalls standing in almost this exact spot many years ago, the store dim and empty after their first open mic night, feeling high on the plausible deniability of Tina Turner’s words. He whispered “I love that song” and Patrick whispered “I know you do” and when they kissed they both pretended not to notice what was different about it.

“It works,” David says.

“Okay.” Jayson apparently accepts David’s word as all the proof he needs, which feels like too much power. “But if, uh– if someone wanted to do that, how would they know what lyrics to use?”

Patrick smiles wide and pulls out his phone. “You just have to find something that speaks to you. Here, I can show you some of my favorites.”

“Uncle Patrick, you still play music from your phone?” Jayson clicks his tongue. “That’s cute.”

David tries to stay out of it after that, he really does. He finishes scrubbing down the table and starts rearranging the displaced merchandise while his husband plays whatever he wants over the store’s sound system. These two should have their moment. But David can only take so much of the strumming guitar and Patrick’s explanations of how this or that lyric is “a metaphor for love,” which only get a ten year old’s blank stare in return. 

“Okay, step aside, Mr. Singer-Songwriter,” David says, taking over the Bluetooth command of the speakers in the middle of a Florence and the Machine track. “This is a job for pop music.”

David cues up love songs from Mariah and Beyoncé and Christina and for the next half hour the shop is filled with the sound of the only straightforward emotions he used to allow himself to feel. He couldn’t be prouder when it’s Whitney’s “How Will I Know” that makes Jayson pick up his pen. He doesn’t tell them the words he’s writing or whose card he’s writing them in, and they don’t ask. 

David switches over to the Carly Rae Jepsen station, Patrick turns the broom into a lip-sync mic stand, and the three of them finish cleaning up in dance party mode.

***

“Yeah, Robin Hood fox could still get it,” David says as the credits start to roll.

When this doesn’t get any response, he sits up to find Patrick and Jayson at the other end of the couch, out cold. The sleepover is part of their Christmas gift to Rebecca and Jay this year, a kid-free stay at the Crystal Elms spa. Jayson’s younger sister Jessie (proof that this family is capable of producing acceptable names when they want to) is spending all weekend with her grandparents back home.

David watches them for a moment, Jayson hugged to Patrick’s chest, his blond head rising and falling with every inhale and exhale. It’s precious, seeing his husband snuggled up with someone small. Dammit, they are going to have to get that puppy Patrick keeps lobbying for, aren’t they?

Jayson’s already in his pajamas, and it’s past his bedtime. He’s probably getting too big to be carried, but David does it anyway, keeping one hand at the back of his neck all the way up to the guest bedroom, because it’s important to support their heads, David remembers hearing about that. He reminds himself to lift from his legs on the stairs, because his body has decided to age without his permission. Last week he spotted a stain of gray at his hairline and spent ten minutes worrying at it in the bathroom mirror. “Don’t you dare, old man,” Patrick said before he could even ask about dyeing it.

He gets Jayson all tucked into bed, and then instead of turning out the bedside lamp, he lingers. He sits on the edge of the mattress. After a minute, he reaches out to run a hand through his nephew’s hair. Then he does it again.

He knows what this must look like. If there were someone standing in the doorway right now, they might say something like, “It’s not too late, you know. You can still change your mind.” And it’s true. He can. His 35th birthday was only _mumble mumble_ years ago, after all. But that’s not what this is about. 

He wasted too much of his life longing for a different one. He definitely got his 10,000 hours in, and that expertise is useless to him now. It’s longing for the life he has that’s keeping him in this room. A longing to feel the current moment under his palms. 

Then there is someone standing in the doorway, but it’s only Patrick, who says, “What’s on your mind?”

As always, it’s easy to say when it’s Patrick asking. “Did you ever think I might change my mind about wanting kids?”

“Never.”

“Never?” It’s the answer David expected, but somehow it’s still hard to believe. Patrick has witnessed so much change in him, why not this too? “What made you so sure?”

“ _You_ were so sure.” Patrick says this like it’s obvious, which it is. “David, the first thing I ever noticed about you, the first thing I ever loved about you, is that you know exactly who you are. So when you told me you were sure you didn’t want to be a dad, how could I have ever doubted it?”

David can still remember how his self-certainty used to feel like an obstacle, just something other people tripped over as they passed him on by. They told him it was a character flaw, a turn-off, a mistake, when they noticed it at all. He never knew it could bring someone closer, not until Patrick.

Jayson mutters something in his sleep.

“Should I wake him up to use the bathroom? I don’t want him to–“ David wrings his hands. “I want him to feel comfortable. Here. With us.”

Patrick’s steps are silent on the carpet and then he’s at David’s side, reaching down to rescue one of the wrung-out hands, giving it a little squeeze. “We’ll do it before we turn in. Come on, I have something for you first.”

The something is down in the kitchen, hidden in the pocket of Patrick’s winter coat. It’s the card Jayson painted with blue-to-red ombré hearts. David takes a moment to admire the cover, running a finger over the soft brushwork. Maybe next year they’ll–

“Yeah, I knew you already changed your mind about next year,” Patrick says, because of course he does. “Open it.”

David does.

> _Dear David (Rose, not Westin),_
> 
> _Carly said it best. I really, really, really,_
> 
> _really, really, really like you._
> 
> _Love,_
> 
> _Patrick_

David knows there’s nothing he can do, no words he can say that will mask how it feels to be holding this, the first gay grade school valentine of one Patrick Brewer. He’s fine with that. He stopped being terrified of his big expressive face and his big expressive heart long ago.

Still, someone has to uphold the standards of taste in this family.

“Of all the lyrics, _this_ is what you choose?”

“It’s how I feel, David.” Patrick shrugs, smirks, steps in close. “I can’t help it.”

His eyes slide down to David’s lips and this is going to be one of those kisses that take their time, David can tell. He loves it when they take their time.


End file.
